


Who Wants To Be In Charge

by lunarpaddle



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, Gen, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Post-Season/Series 05, brief appearance from the inhuman court, daisy is a menace that natasha definitely absolutely does not admire or have feelings for at all, daisy is a nightmare, director!natasha, if the aos team had joined up with the avengers during the snap, set during the snap, she won't stop coming back from missions with kids shes adopted
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-03
Updated: 2021-02-22
Packaged: 2021-03-03 22:21:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 12,875
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24523021
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lunarpaddle/pseuds/lunarpaddle
Summary: "Nat, meet Daisy Johnson," Bobbi says, gesturing over to her with a vaguely evil looking smirk.Shit, shit, shit.“Better hacker than Stark, inhuman so powerful she recently solved a problem by literally shooting a threat into outer space, Melinda May once admitted without prompting that she’s a ‘damn good fighter’ -” the Widow’s mouth drops open at that last one, which makes sense: May had been her SO, at least for a bit. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad.“Once told me that - and I quote - ‘Now that I’ve actually fought some supervillains of my own I kinda think most of the Avengers suck ass, but I’d still totally let the Black Widow raw me.’”Daisy shrieks, and quakes Bobbi over a wall.
Relationships: Leo Fitz/Jemma Simmons, Natasha Romanov/Skye | Daisy Johnson
Comments: 70
Kudos: 506





	1. Chapter 1

The ride home from Tahiti was solemn, but hopeful in its own way – they’d lost Coulson, and they still hadn’t found Fitz, but for the first time in years there was no immediate, world-ending threat they had to deal with.

It was a nice feeling, whilst it lasted.

The next day, half the population of the earth turned to dust.

\---

“I can’t believe you guys are seriously trying to make me director, again!” They’d lost Mack, May and Deke in the snap, and between the crying and the yelling nobody had been able to figure out what to do next.

“Who else is going to do it?” Elena snaps back at Daisy, waving her hands in exasperation. “You're literally the only person here with any leadership experience!”

“What - what about Simmons! She was pretty high up the chain back when Mace was running things!”

“Oh, absolutely not. I was terrible at it, everyone hated me, and nobody _told_ me anything! And besides, I’m off to find Fitz the first chance I get, I can hardly direct S.H.I.E.L.D. from space,” Jemma scoffs.

“Okay, that’s fair, but I can’t do it! We know this! Last time someone tried to put me in charge I treated half of you like shit, completely abandoned the base to go dig up my mom’s grave, and then passed it off to someone else the first chance I got!” 

Elena opens her mouth to reply, but Piper beats her to it.

“Guys, can we just – why do we even need a director? It’s not like there’s much S.H.I.E.L.D. left to direct, there’s only 5 of us!” That shuts everybody up for a second, as Piper receives a mix of incredulous and considering looks from the other four.

“There were less agents than that when Coulson was made Director. He rebuilt S.H.I.E.L.D. from the ground up, we can’t just – we can’t just abandon that now he’s dead,” Daisy eventually replies, somewhat half-heartedly.

“Who says we abandon it?” Davis speaks up for the first time in the meeting. “Look, we’re not the only ones dealing with this – half the Avengers are gone too, half of Stark Industries, half of whatever organisation Fury’s been off running in the shadows. Everyone’s gotta be reeling from this. I say, we go find them, help each other out, rebuild that way. Maybe we’ll even run into someone actually interested in running things.”

The other 4 look up at Davis, and then at each other.

“All in favour of making Davis interim Director?” Daisy asks, and pandemonium erupts again.

\---

By the end of the day, everyone on the team had refused to be made director at least once, Daisy and Elena had decided Davis was the director even if he didn’t want to be, Piper had made it clear that she’d quit if she ever had to follow Davis’s orders, and Jemma had decided she’d stick with the group till they found the Avengers so she could bully them into giving her a space ship.

Davis had sighed, told Daisy to have a location he could fly them to in the morning, and gone to bed.


	2. Chapter 2

Natasha Romanoff should never be in charge of anything important, ever.

This was a fact that was exceedingly obvious to herself, and somehow, completely not obvious to anyone else at all.

“Someone has to run things,” Rhodey had said, “And you’re the only original Avenger left.”

She had tried to tell him that nobody cared who had been an ‘original’ Avenger, but then the Raccoon had volunteered to run things and within minutes she’d been begged into taking the position.

It didn’t help that this was about the worst possible time to be running things – the entire world was in chaos, every country demanding answers, riots and revolutions and – well, okay, she did actually understand a fair bit about socio-political manoeuvring, and she had at least 7 ideas of how she could use this position to maybe enact some widespread societal reform, but still! Hell, if anything, that was exactly why she shouldn’t be in the position, she was absolutely going to start meddling in politics, and – 

The point was, she should never be in charge of anything important, ever.

For now, though, she was sticking strictly to cleaning up super-level messes. The U.S. government were messing around with superhuman experimentation and trying to get their hands on Iron Man tech, again, presumably believing that without Stark or Rogers in the way they could get away with it - she put Rhodey on that, for obvious reasons.

She had Rocket and Nebula on trying to track down Clint – they were low on people that could help, really low, and she could really, really use her friend back right now. It was a little selfish, maybe, but a loose enraged Hawkeye probably wasn’t a good thing for anyone anyway, so she could justify it.

Carol had more or less immediately shot off to go deal with the rest of the galaxy, but had promised to keep an eye on the situation around Earth, make sure they didn’t have to deal with any external threats, so that was – something.

Her and Okoye were working double time doing basically everything else. Out of control Inhuman in Nebraska, hate group in the U.K. that somehow got their hands on alien weapons, some kind of failed experiment from the Australian government that had escaped containment when half the guards disappeared – god, a lot of really awful things had escaped containment when half the guards disappeared. They still didn’t know where Blonsky was, and that terrified her.

Last week the New Jersey authorities had tried to call her in to deal with a “high-level supernatural threat” – it had been a kid, who’d just undergone terrigenesis, who could… make her hands really big? She wasn’t hurting anyone, she wasn’t doing anything wrong at all, but the fact that she wouldn’t work for them had been enough for them to treat her as a threat.

She’d ended up having to kill multiple soldiers when they’d opened fire on her for refusing to help, and she still hadn’t even been able to find the kid. She didn’t have the time to even look. She’d begged Tony into getting his AI systems to try and track her down, but the only picture they even had was completely blurred, and the internet was going down all over the place as half the number of maintenance workers tried desperately to keep everything working amidst the fallout.

Bruce wasn’t even officially an Avenger anymore, but she’d managed to persuade him to resolve the nuclear situation before he went off soul searching. Half the people maintaining the nuclear power plants were gone too, after all, and some of them had the situation under control but some of them didn’t, at all.

Everything was fucked, was the point. And Natasha was in charge of it all, and she absolutely hated it.


	3. Chapter 3

Daisy has to force herself to not freak out when they arrive at the New Avengers HQ and are personally greeted by The Black Widow. Bobbi, however, runs straight up to The Black Widow and gives her a hug that literally lifts her up off the floor, which – 

Right, yeah, they’d gone to go find Bobbi at least partially because none of the remaining team had had anything even resembling an in with the Avengers, but she hadn’t known they were this close! And then Bobbi puts The Black Widow down and turns to Daisy with an evil smirk, and oh god, she had definitely absolutely fangirled over her to Bobbi at some point, she was so screwed – 

“Nat, meet what’s left of S.H.I.E.L.D.: Simmons,” she gestures to Jemma, who doesn’t even look up from her tablet as she waves back, “best scientist I know, which _you_ know is saying a lot – Elena, Inhuman, badass agent, was more or less unstoppable even before she got the robotic arms – “ Elena rolls her eyes and gives Bobbi a light punch on the arm, “Piper and Davis, who admittedly, I don’t know very well, but they must have done some pretty impressive stuff to end up rolling with these guys,” Davis blushes at that, and Piper looks down at her feet, “and of course, Daisy Johnson.”

Shit, shit, shit.

“Better hacker than Stark, inhuman so powerful she recently solved a problem by literally shooting a threat into outer space, Melinda May once admitted without prompting that she’s a ‘damn good fighter' -” the Widow’s mouth drops open at that last one, which makes sense - May had been her SO at least for a bit. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad.

“Once told me that - and I quote - ‘Now that I’ve actually fought some supervillains of my own I kinda think most of the Avengers suck ass, but I’d still totally let the Black Widow raw me.’”

Daisy shrieks, and quakes Bobbi over a wall.

\---

That whole…situation, aside, everything else goes surprisingly well for them. Jemma mentions needing to go find her friend who was stuck in space, and Natasha just groans something along the lines of “not again” and calls up Captain Marvel. They get set up with bunks with minimal fuss, and Daisy even manages to extract a promise that their team could stay together from Natasha, who was significantly less scary once you’d seen her begging a hysterical Bobbi to "please, please take over from me, I can’t do this anymore" – apparently the lack of desire to lead thing was going around.

Bobbi was going to work solo missions like Natasha, and Okoye, who they had yet to meet. She was getting a superhero name and everything – Mockingbird, she’d decided on, when Natasha had angrily insisted that if she wasn’t going to take over from her she could damn well get in the game.

“Do you think I can get them to give me a really big gun?” Piper muses from the corner of the communal kitchen. “You all have like, a thing, and I don’t have a thing, and I think having a really big gun could be a cool thing.”

“Didn’t Coulson used to have a really big gun?” Elena asks.

“What, Bambino? I think that’s still on the Zephyr somewhere, actually.” Jemma had perked up considerably since Carol had told her she’d be delivering Fitz back to earth ASAP.

“Shit, I didn’t even know that existed. Wouldn’t wanna steal Coulson’s old shit though.”

Daisy can’t help but laugh. “Don’t worry about it,” she tells Piper, “I think he’d want it to get used on cool Avengers missions.”

\---

“Are there any plans for reversing the snap?” She asks Natasha in private, one day. They’re working on updating the threat map with all the new info from the last few years of S.H.I.E.L.D. activity – apparently the Avengers had never even known about the framework, or LMDs, or the Darkholdt. This simultaneously made sense, and was pretty surprising, considering they were. You know. The Avengers.

“They’re dead,” Natasha replies after a second, giving her an incredulous look.

“And? Have you not been around for the last, like, decade? Dying permanently is for losers these days – I mean, Coulson’s died like, twice now? And I’m fully expecting to see him again within a year, max. Probably some alternate universe version of him or some shit.” Not that losing him didn’t hurt, but – well, it just seemed par for the course at this point. At least they’d seen his death coming – May, Mack, Hunter – god, even Deke. They were all gone, and she’d be damned if they weren’t gonna get them back some way or another.

“Right, well. Let me know when you work out time travel.”

There was a long, heavy pause.

“Daisy,” Natasha says, in a low and dangerous tone of voice that she had learnt over the last week meant ‘What the fuck did you do this time’.

“Hey, you’re the one who told me to take you through everything chronologically! We didn’t get to the time travel stuff till after we defeated the half-demon half-AI bent on killing us all!”


	4. Chapter 4

Natasha had thought she hated running things before. She had thought she understood exactly how much of a nightmare it could be. 

Natasha had been painfully naïve.

It wasn’t that the Shield Team, as they’d begun to be referred to as, weren’t good at their jobs. They were very, very good at their jobs. She had worried, especially when she’d heard what Daisy’s power was, that they’d be the kind of team that got the job done and left truly awful amounts of property damage and paperwork behind them. They weren’t. (Rocket and Nebula were, and it was a complete nightmare).

No, the specific kind of nightmare that the Shield Team were was harder to pin down, and most easily described through example.

\---

_3 weeks ago_

Natasha had assigned the new agents to Emil Blonsky for their first mission. This was, some people had suggested to her, a bit harsh – but it wasn’t like this was these guys’ first rodeo, and she was far more comfortable sending a team to recover him than a single person, and all else aside Daisy was probably the first person they’d recruited for New Avengers strong enough to actually take down someone who gave Bruce trouble.

She could still see why certain people would think it was harsh, though.

They’d stayed in contact for the first week, Daisy reporting back to her on her efforts to locate him via the internet, and the newly reunited Fitzsimmons’ attempt at tracking down his radioactive signature. 

They’d gone dark 2 days ago, after reporting a possible lead on his location.

Natasha absolutely wasn’t worried about them. She’d let herself get attached to the old team, and now they were all gone, and she hadn’t even been leader then – it was important that she keep things rational and emotions-free. She had Steve to talk to if she really needed to get stuff off her chest. Tony, even, if she wanted to make the trip – he was still a little angry at her, but not the same way he was at Steve.

So she wasn’t worried about them, at all, not like that. But they were very useful assets – that much was obvious from how many times they’d saved the world without anyone even knowing – and she’d been looking forward to having a little of the weight of the whole situation taken off her shoulders.

She was considering sending Okoye to track them down when the landing pad sensors notified her that the Zephyr was back. 

“Hey Natasha!” Daisy said brightly. There was a bruise covering half her face that looked a couple days old, and one of her arms was in a sling. The other was being used to drag an unconscious Abomination behind her.

“Daisy,” she said slowly, eyes glued to Blonsky. “Why is the mass-murdering weapon of mass-destruction not…restrained?”

“He is restrained!” she replied, flipping the behemoth over with ease to reveal that his hands were tied behind his back. “Special cuffs Fitz made for him – he wouldn’t fit in the containment module, which, in retrospect, we could have worked that out before we left. But hey.”

Right. Wonderful.

“The cuffs should hold him and keep him unconscious as long as they’re on. You’ll have to chuck him in an ordinary cell for now, but I’ve written up blueprints for –“ Fitz was interrupted by Simmons as they both walked out of the plane.

“ _We’ve_ written up blueprints for a safe containment cell for him,” she said, elbowing Fitz lightly in the side. “Ethical, too! It’s got entertainment and everything.”

She sighed. “Okay, get that built as quickly as possible, you’ll have all the access you need to the fabrication drones. Now, why the hell haven’t you all been in contact for the last two days?”

“Well, funny story – “ Daisy began, only to be interrupted by Davis as he, Piper and Elena exited the plane.

“Apologies for the lack of communications, ma’am. We found Blonsky in the custody of a rogue inhuman group planning on using him for an attack in Paris. We apprehended everybody involved, but one of the inhumans involved was capable of shutting down electrical equipment in a large radius even whilst unconscious, so we weren’t able to get in contact with you till we returned.”

Thank god for Davis. That was how agent-director interactions were supposed to be. But also… what?

“How did you get back here on the Zephyr without electricity?”

“Oh,” Simmons said nonchalantly, “After the whole nightmare with the Zephyr nearly running out of power when we were in the Framework I got Fitz to make sure it could run on mechanical power purely if necessary.”

“You did?” Fitz asked, immediately sparking a minor spat. Sometimes she thought about the timeline of their whole situation and got a headache, but for the time being she just left them to bicker quietly off to the side.

“That still doesn’t account for the two-day gap,” she pushed. “The Zephyr shouldn’t take more than a day to get between any two locations on the planet.”

“Oh, yeah, they captured us for a bit.” Daisy said, provoking a snort from Elena.

“Right, they ‘captured’ us. She didn’t knock us both out trying to use her powers to blow through a reinforced steel wall at all.”

“Elena!” Daisy looked faintly embarrassed now, cheeks reddening. “I’ve said sorry like, 50 times, and besides it’s – it’s not my fault I’m still getting used to the increased power levels! And Davis and Piper rescued us anyway, so it was fine.”

“Rescued us letting the Abomination out in the process, you mean?” Elena replied, smirking.

“Hey!” Piper said. “How was I supposed to know we were hitting their base at the exact time they were supposed to administer the daily sedative to him? You should all just consider yourselves lucky I had my very big, very not at all electrically powered gun to take them all out!”

Daisy rolled her eyes. “Anyway, Blonsky got out but I subdued him before he could cause too much damage. The warehouse they were using was pretty massive, and that got trashed, but I figure that’s not a big deal.” It wasn’t. But – 

“You…subdued him.”

“Yeah! Like he’s the toughest thing I’ve beaten up, right?”

“I think he might actually be,” Simmons said, apparently finished berating Fitz for being jealous of his past self. “I really need to get some more readings on your new power levels.”

“Yeah, well,” Daisy blustered, “He’s not the toughest thing I _could_ beat up, so. Wasn’t even that hard.”

Natasha really, really wished she didn’t have to be in charge of this mess.

\---

“She…beat up Emil Blonsky? I know you said she was strong, but…damn.”

“Language, Steve,” she replies. “And yeah, they took down some inhuman terrorist cell too.”

“Well, guess you don’t need me after all, huh.” 

They’re sitting on the sofa at Steve’s apartment, talking and having dinner – it’s a weekly thing, these days, and she treasures it.

“Asshole, of course we could still use you.” She says, and he grins. “God, you’d think it’d be a good time, but they’re just – they’re a nightmare! Daisy especially. She just strolls back into base, all casual, like ‘yeah! I beat up a potentially city-destroying threat! No biggy! Don’t mind my broken arm!’” She does her best impression of Daisy, before slumping back down into the sofa.

Steve gives her a Look.

“Oh, shut up,” she says.


	5. Chapter 5

Daisy has been falling into a routine, or at least sort of a routine, here at the New Avengers HQ. She has no clue how to feel about it.

On the one hand, it’s kinda wonderful – it’s been so, so long, since her life was anything even approaching stable. Sure, she went on regular missions to take down superpowered threats, but that was her job! And between missions she had a nice room, regular training hours, weekly game nights with the whole gang, movie nights with Jemma and Leo whenever they could fit them in. It was the closest her life had been to normal since – well, since ever, actually.

On the other hand, something about it felt…wrong. And like, that was absolutely partially her just being traumatised and paranoid and convinced something was going to go wrong, but she was getting therapy for that (she had a therapist!), and it wasn’t the only issue.

She feels like she shouldn’t be this put together. Coulson, May, Mack, Hunter – she’s lost so many of her friends so recently and sure, she's sad, but she should be devastated! She should be wrecked, like after everything with Jia-ying, or everything with Lincoln, but she isn’t. And she feels guilty as fuck about it.

So, yeah. She doesn’t really know what's going on with her emotions. But she keeps herself mostly distracted, and today they were due to set off on another mission – she’d managed to track down a fugitive inhuman girl that Natasha had asked her to look for (something that even Stark’s AI hadn’t managed, which she felt very smug about), and they were set to go retrieve her. Simple mission - save the girl, maybe give her some trademarked Daisy “You have to learn to accept yourself as an Inhuman” spiel, get her back to base.

She can’t wait to see what went wrong.

\---

The girl’s name is Kamala Khan – 17 years old (16 when Nat had come across her), inhuman, shapeshifting powers. They aren’t anything fancy, so they don’t need to worry about Agent 33-style face changing, but they're really, really powerful – as far as they can tell she can alter her mass as well as her shape, allowing her the same level of power Ant-man could achieve with his shrinking and growing, except without a suit, and with way more flexibility.

She's a perfect target for the now completely out of control U.S. Superhuman Weaponry Program to “recruit”, in other words. 

And yet she’s managed to stay under the radar incredibly well – something a girl her age shouldn’t be able to manage without the kind of computer skills that Daisy had had when she was that age. There's absolutely nothing to indicate that Kamala has those skills.

Natasha and JARVIS had spent nearly a year looking for this girl to no avail, but when Daisy had been handed the data it had clicked within the week:

1: Kamala Khan was not capable of hiding herself this well.

2: Therefore, someone else was hiding her themselves.

3: There were a very limited number of organisations capable of hiding someone from the extensive information network of the U.S., in disarray as it might be, and even fewer organisations that could hide someone from her.

4: Of those organisations, only one both was active in an appropriate area to rescue Kamala and had reason to keep her safe – and luckily, it was an organisation she might actually be able to get a meeting with.

\---

“The Inhuman Court – inhuman activists working out of the U.S., definitely the most powerful group of its kind in the area. They’ve been involved in a number of conflicts across the states, but most of them seem to be against local governments and Watchdogs cells, so they’re not marked as an active threat – still, we can’t be too careful. Protocol if things get messy is for Daisy and Elena to hold ground whilst the rest of us get evacuated as quickly as possible – these guys have a lot of heavy hitters available, and an all out fight could end with casualties, and would definitely end with more bad blood than we’re interested in.”

Davis might have protested at his appointment as unofficial director, but he’d really taken to running the field team – after everything, he’d some come out with the least weird trauma, and the most common sense.

“Remember guys,” Daisy says, turning to the team, “just let me do the talking, alright? I did a lot of work with people like this back in the day, and some of them are bound to at least know I’m trustworthy.”

“You did?” Jemma asks as they walk down the ramp onto the roof of a building that was apparently the Inhuman Court base. “I was under the impression you mostly… well, robbed banks and beat up Watchdogs?”

“I mean, yeah,” she replies, “but finding said Watchdogs ended up being more, uh – collaborative, than expected. I wasn’t the only one looking to beat on those assholes.”

“And you never thought to mention this?” Piper butts in, Bambino strapped awkwardly to her back.

“I mean, I don’t think any of them would have appreciated being ratted out to S.H.I.E.L.D. – and besides, it was good to know someone was still working on that shit whilst I went back to dealing with… well, you know. S.H.I.E.L.D. shit.” 

Davis glarespointedly at Piper for this entire explanation, till Piper belatedly removed Bambino from her back and lays it against the wall in the ship.

“Sue me for wanting to bring protection,” she mutters underneath her breath, before they all turn in the direction of a cough from the other side of the roof.

Standing opposite from them is a tall woman with long, red hair that twisted and flowed all by itself, curling itself into patterns in the air around her. 

“There will be no need for weaponry. Whatever…bad blood, there may be, I’m quite sure we can resolve it without bloodshed.”

Daisy is frozen because - because what were the fucking odds, come on, it couldn't be -

“Medusa?!”

\---

The remainder of the Shield Team sits awkwardly in what felt oddly like a waiting area, listening intently to the torrent of shouting coming from the next room.

“You fucking ABANDONED US! And for fucking – for fucking SHIELD! You said you’d never go back there, never be some fucking government shill again, and yet there you fucking go – “

“The fate of the fucking WORLD was at stake, Medusa! What the fuck was I supposed to do? And we’re not even a government group anymore, we – “

“But it was, when you re-joined, right? You were working for the same fucking government running the ATCU – “

“We took down the ATCU! Which is, you know, more than we ever managed running around doing things the way we were – “

The conversation had been going on like this for a while, and showed no signs of abating. Also in the room with the team was another woman, bearing a passing resemblance to Medusa, weaving a tiny fireball in and out through her fingers absent-mindedly.

“So… Daisy and the awesome hair lady definitely like… you know. Right?” Piper asks quietly, looking around at the rest of the team.

“Piper!” Jemma hisses, “They absolutely did not – Daisy isn’t even into women!” At that, Fitz and Elena both turn to her with a look of complete incredulity, and Fitz starts opening his mouth to say something when the woman in the corner speaks.

“I would thank all of you to refrain from discussing my sister’s past sexual exploits, if you would be so kind.”

The team falls once more into silence, as the shouts continue to wash over them.

\---

“Okay, so, they do absolutely have Kamala, but they’re having trouble keeping her safe with so much heat on her specifically – apparently the local governments aren’t the only ones getting in on the ‘kidnapping young, vulnerable inhumans’ action. Obviously it’s up to her in the end, but they don’t have an issue with handing over custody to us if she’s cool with it.”

The team gives Daisy a collection of looks, all of which she would describe as some variant of ‘disbelieving’.

“Look, me and Medusa might have some – some history, and obviously these guys aren’t exactly pro-government, but we aren’t actually government, and they’ve heard about some of the stuff Nat’s had Rhodey doing to help out in the area, and Medusa’s not that awful, she’s not gonna endanger a kid over an old friend with benefits – “

“Hah! Pay up, Davis!” Piper shrieks, sticking out her hand.

“You – you guys bet on whether we slept together?”

“Oh, no,” Davis says, begrudgingly handing over a fiver to Piper, “We bet on whether it was a serious relationship or just a sex thing.”

“I tried to stop them,” Jemma says.

“She tried to join the bet, actually,” Elena pipes up, “but she bet on you two just being friends and they wouldn’t let her put any money on that.”

“As acting Director of this team, it is my responsibility to look after everyone’s best interests,” Davis says, trying and failing to keep a smile off his face.

“I – wait, Jemma, you – okay, look, never mind, can we stop talking about my fucking sex life and go find this teenage girl before one of like. 20 different evil government organisations kidnaps her?”

“Fine,” Elena says, rolling her eyes, “but you know I’m interrogating you about this later, right?”


	6. Chapter 6

They’re on the way to the address the Court provided when an alert pops up on the screen in front of Fitz.

“Bloody hell,” Fitz calls out, “someone’s just hit the building we’re headed to – gunfire, explosion on the ground floor – someone’s about to get to her before we do.”

“Okay, they’ve gotta have some kinda escape vehicle,” Davis yells back from the pilot’s seat, “ I want weapons hot, ready for precision targeting of engines – I’m gonna bring us over the building, I want Daisy, Elena and Piper ready to drop in. Secure the target at all costs, evacuate the building, don’t bother engaging with these guys anymore than you have to.”

“Got it,” Daisy says, slipping her gauntlets on as they head for the cargo bay.

“Gonna try and strap that ridiculous gun over your parachute?” Elena asks Piper teasingly.

“Hell no,” Piper replies, “I’m gonna carry it, and land all like – like in a power pose, take out a few guys before I even land! It’s gonna be super cool.”

“You know what’s super un-cool?” Daisy says as the cargo bay doors open.

“What?” Piper asks, whilst Elena gives her an exasperated look – Daisy had pulled this exact move on her a couple missions ago.

“Needing a parachute,” she says, turning and winking before letting herself fall backwards out of the Zephyr.

Sometimes, she really fucking loves being a superhero.

\---

Daisy’s landing sends a collection of men flying off their feet, and Piper does actually take a few of them out before hitting the ground, before Elena cleans up the rest. All jokes aside, they do work really smoothly together these days.

“Looks like a mess down there,” Piper comments, pulling open the roof door to reveal a stairwell that winds a few floors down till it turns into a crater.

“You two good to clear the building?” She asks, getting nods back. “Awesome. I’m gonna make a beeline for the source of that explosion.” With that, she swings herself over the railing and plummets down the stairwell into a three-point landing on the floor of the crater. She doesn’t even need her powers for this stuff anymore – the whole centipede serum thing is pretty awesome.

She does a quick mental sweep of the area as the people around her react – two obvious government spooks swing assault rifles round to point at her, but the other 3 people here definitely aren’t agents of anything. Ragged looking clothes, basic body armour, collars around their necks – one of their hands is glowing a bright orange, and that’s when she gets it.

“Damn, really guys?” She says, straightening up. “Are those explosive collars? That’s fucked up.”

“Nielsen, get the girl,” one of the agents snarls, “Miller, Wang, take this bitch out whilst we go get ready for evac.”

Well, wasn’t that just typical. Running away and letting their pet inhumans do the dirty work for them. Glowy-hand guy, Miller apparently, raises a hand and lets off a blast that she just barely deflects in time.

“Alright,” she says, only partially playing for time, “Can we just, like hold up a second?” Miller’s powers seem pretty similar to Hellfire’s, but they’re faster and there’s barely any warning to work with, so she’ll have to keep a close eye on him. “Those collars look nasty, but I’m pretty sure I can get them off,” She has no idea what Wang’s powers are, but she’s pretty sure there’s something up with his skin, so it might be armour-based, “and like, I’m totally gonna try and do that anyway, but it’ll be much easier if we don’t have to do it whilst fighting.”

The two glance at each other, and then back at Daisy.

\---

Kamala is scared, but she thinks that’s probably fair, given her current situation. The world around her is distorting, curving and bending away from her at every movement and touch as she scrambles backwards away from the man approaching her.

“Ha!” The man cries out, his voice so harsh it hurts her ears. “So that’s what the little girl’s afraid of, is it? Being helpless? Well, I barely even have to work for this one – you are helpless!”

Kamala shivers, bunching her hands up into fists.

“Yeah well, at least I – at least I don’t sound like some, clichéd B-List villain.” It’s not her best line, but it’ll probably have to do.

“B-List, huh?” he replies, reaching down to wrap a bony hand around her arm. “We’ll see how you feel about that once we’ve been training together for a few months.” He goes to tug her up, but stops as the collar around his neck clicks, and falls off neatly onto the ground.

“She’s not going anywhere,” comes a voice from behind him, “And you don’t have to either. They can’t control you anymore.”

He turns away from Kamala to face the voice, and as he does she gets a glimpse of black body armour and silver gauntlets.

“Control me?” He shrieks. “Who says I have to be controlled? Maybe I like this!” God, this dude was terrible, and not even in the scary way at this point. It was just… bad.

“Yeah,” the voice replies, “that tracks with your whole aesthetic, I guess. So you gonna come at me, or what?”

Shit. She doesn't know who this is, but whoever it is has no clue about this guy’s power. She gathers up the last of her energy and reaches out an arm, long and snaking, to pull herself over to the wall where she can see what's going on.

“Come at you?” he cackles. “Oh, there won’t be any of that. Tell me, Quake – what are _you_ afraid of?”

Quake? Holy shit, that – that is Quake, isn’t it? Her vision is kinda blurry at this point, but as the world around them all falls away into the void she manages to focus her vision enough to confirm it. Hot damn, someone she’d written fanfiction about had just saved her life.

“Ahhh,” he breathes out, “now this is a classic! You’re afraid of being _alone_ ,” he says, and as that last word comes out of his mouth visions of corpses appear littering the floor around Quake, bloody and crumpled. Kamala has to stop herself from throwing up.

“All your friends dying, leaving you all by yourself – pretty likely, too, in your line of work! You’ve already lost plenty, haven’t you? Is this really what you want, Quake? To keep fighting, and fighting, till you’re the last one standing? Honestly, you’d probably be better off letting me kill you now!” Quake is staring down, eyes wide and face pale, taking in the vision – they must be people she knows, Kamala thinks, people she loves. 

The man approaches Quake, slipping a knife out and grinning at her frozen form, and Kamala – she has to do something, she _has to_ – 

“You’re wrong,” Quake says, and in a flash she’s reached out, grabbed the man’s arm holding the knife, stepping through the illusions. 

“This – I’m not afraid of this anymore. Yeah, maybe someday all these people will be dead,” she steps forward, voice cracking, “some of them already are, and yeah, it fucking sucks. But I won’t be alone." She takes another step forward, forcing him back.

"People are always gonna leave eventually, one way or another. But there will always be new people too,“ another step, "all kinds of amazing new people, and life keeps changing, and you _move on._ " She takes another step forward, tightening her grip on the man’s arm, quaking him till the knife drops from his hand before releasing him.

“Now, are you gonna back down, or am I gonna have to knock your bony ass out?”

Kamala thinks, as she slips into unconsciousness, that she was absolutely right to idolise Quake, and she’s never going to let any boring adults tell her otherwise ever again.


	7. Chapter 7

“How is it that the first time I met this kid she ran away immediately, and in the space of, what? Two conversations with her? She completely idolises you.”

“Well,” Daisy says, “I did save her life.” Natasha thought that might be a fair point, except – 

“I also saved her life, Agent Johnson,” she replies, trying to give Daisy her best simultaneously annoyed and disaffected look.

“Well,” Daisy leans forward against the desk, “I guess it must just be my charming demeanour then, huh?”

Fucking hell. 

“Well, I suppose I can’t fault you for completing the mission as instructed and getting us on good terms with the Court at the same time.” She restrains a smirk at Daisy’s reddening face. “A progress review isn’t actually why I called you in here, though. The point is, Kamala clearly responds well to you – I think you should be in charge of training her.”

“I – what? I do a practically perfect job and you’re just gonna, what, put me on babysitting duty? I’d rather not, thanks.”

Natasha sighs.

“When I say I think you should train her, Daisy, what I mean is I am putting you in charge of training her. It’s not a request. Weren’t you in charge of training up an Inhuman unit for S.H.I.E.L.D. before?”

“I - ” Daisy shrinks in on herself a little bit. “That didn’t exactly go well.” Oh.

“Daisy,” she says, letting her guard drop a little despite her better instincts, “I know what happened with that. You told me, remember? And I can tell you, from an objective, outside point of view, that it wasn’t your fault. There was no way you could have known when you were putting it together that a threat that might as well have been designed explicitly to counter your team was just around the corner.”

Daisy looks back up at her, and it’s a little bit heart-breaking. She’s gotten so used to Daisy being an optimistic force of nature over the past few months, when even Captain Fucking America has decided that maybe hope is overrated, that sometimes she has to take a second to remember everything in that debrief – how when you really take a step back and look at it all, Daisy’s been through as much shit as –

Well, through as much shit as her, maybe. 

“Daisy, I’ve met exactly one agent that you’ve trained personally,” she says when Daisy doesn’t reply, “And she’s one of the best and most talented agents I have the pleasure of knowing. I’m not doing this as a punishment for – I don’t even know what it would be for. I genuinely believe you’re the best person for the job.”

Daisy smiles, and she could swear she sees the light flow back into her eyes. 

“Alright.”

\---

Natasha has made such a big mistake. The biggest mistake. On so, so many levels. 

Level 1: Kamala is stupid powerful, and Daisy is stupid powerful, and training sessions that required repairs were one thing when it was only on the rare occasion Carol came to visit, and another entirely when it was every single day. 

Fitzsimmons had offered to design a specialised training room, which was kind of them, but last time she checked the idea had ballooned into some huge, incredibly complicated project they were calling the ‘Danger Zone’ and that – well, it would be great future-proofing when it was done, but until then they were still stuck. Right now she had them training in a nearby rubbish dump, but with the current state of the place she didn’t think that would last for long, and Daisy was talking about wanting to practice indoor combat – 

Level 2: They were a nightmare around the base. Daisy had, in fact, already been a nightmare – there had been more than one prank war started since she moved in, and although as far as she could tell Daisy and Bobbi mostly kept it between themselves, but she knew it was only a matter of time before she was targeted. Kamala, meanwhile, appeared to have decided she was Daisy’s mini-me, except without any of the common sense and intelligence that she was always surprised by when Daisy decided to pull it out.

Yesterday Kamala had, somehow, broken the dishwasher. Her natural response to this hadn’t been to get one of the multiple tech-savvy people on base to fix it (which, admittedly, she was glad for – she didn’t need any of them giving the dishwasher extra features), or to wash them up the normal, standard way – no, Kamala had decided that ‘theoretically, right, I thought that if I made my hands really big, I could put 5 plates into one of them, and then use a cloth with each of my fingers on the other, and I’d be washing things up like 5 times faster – “

Needless to say, it hadn’t ended well.

And – and Daisy wasn’t helping! A few days ago, her, Kamala, Elena and Piper had taken a quinjet up because they wanted to try ‘landing strategies’ (something about a stunt Daisy had pulled rescuing Kamala?) which turned out to mean, practically, throwing themselves out of planes from a mile up and seeing what happened. 

Daisy had been fine, obviously. Kamala had apparently reduced herself to the size of an ant, which had worked shockingly well, and explained a lot of the stuff she’d heard about Scott surviving before –

Piper had procured a gadget from Fitz that did something she didn’t even remotely understand, but had in fact worked to get her to the ground safely much faster than a parachute, so she was commissioning one for everyone they had active. 

Elena had tried flapping her arms really, really, fast. It was purely thanks to Daisy that she only had a broken ankle, instead of a broken neck.

(Fitzsimmons hadn’t known about this plan beforehand apparently, but based on data retrieved after they confirmed Elena had, just about, measurably slowed down her falling speed.)

And the point was that this wasn’t remotely what she had in mind when she put Daisy in charge of this, and it was getting ridiculous, and that wasn’t even mentioning –

~~Level 3: How was Daisy such a _mom_? She kept running into her giving the kid advice, or cheering her on at practice, or hugging her, and it was so unbearably cute and she didn’t even know _why_ she thought that – ~~

Level 4: Daisy, it appeared, after a month or so of this, had completely flipped from reluctance to embracing her new role, so much so that – 

“So, uh. You know how you sent me to investigate those weird readings over in New York?”

“Yes, Daisy,” she replies, “I remember the mission I sent you on. Just tell me whatever ridiculous thing it was causing problems this time.”

“Right, well, firstly – I totally managed to get on decent terms with Daredevil! I mean, not good enough for him to give me his name, or a way to contact him or anything, but he willingly worked with me and that’s more than anyone else has managed – “

“Daisy.”

“Right. So, we finally got a location on Fisk after he broke out during the snap – he was working with this woman – Olivia, I think her name was? She seemed quite nice, apart from the whole trying to murder us with her cybernetic tentacles thing – but anyway, it turns out they were trying to get alternate universe tech up and running –" Fuck. “– because Fisk’s wife got dusted in the snap, or something? But it was obviously messing a bunch of stuff up, and there ended up being a bunch of alternate universe versions of Spider-man – you remember him? I think you guys fought once or something? – and we all worked together to get the breach shut, and now everything’s good!”

“Right.” Natasha isn’t convinced – Daisy is rambling far too nervously for everything to be good. “So what’s the problem, then?”

“Well, it’s not a problem, exactly –"

“Hey,” A young girl interrupts, apparently having gotten into the room without making a sound. “I know you guys are busy, but where’s the toilet? Kamala keeps telling me there’s only one and it’s on the other side of the compound, but I’m like, 80% sure she’s talking shit.”

“Natasha, meet Gwen Stacy. Gwen, meet Natasha – Director Romanoff to you, probably. She’s in charge around here.” What the _fuck_.

“Oh, you’re the Black Widow, right? Spider-themed girl superhero rights, dude.”

Natasha looks back and forth between the two for a few seconds before deciding to fix her best glare on Daisy.

“So, yeah, uh –“

“She adopted another one,” Davis says, poking his head around the door. “Sorry. I tried to stop her. Gwen seems really good, for what its worth. Please direct all of your ire towards Daisy.” The door clicks shut.

Daisy gulps.


	8. Chapter 8

“ _The_ Captain Marvel???” Kamala exclaims.

“You know I don’t know who that is, right? Like, we don’t just have versions of every single superhero on my earth –" Gwen says.

“Do you think she’s going to be mad that I took her name? I mean she’s using a different name now, obviously, and she never really picked Ms. Marvel anyway its just what the papers called her until – “

“Ohhh, she’s where you got your dumb superhero name from, I get it now –"

“Says you, ‘Spider-Gwen’! At least I didn’t put my actual name in my superhero name –"

“My alias is Spiderwoman! It’s not my fault the other Spider-people were assholes and decided –"

Daisy is convinced she was never this bad as she watches the two bickering. Like, sure, she had caused an international incident or two with her hacking at that age, but really that was like – that was clever, if you thought about it, because she had to be really clever to do that hacking. This was just… ridiculous.

“We were never this bad, right?” She asks Jemma.

“I mean,” Jemma says, “I think in some ways we might have been worse, actually. We were certainly far less competent – do you remember Peru? At least these two can hold their own in a fight.”

“Wait, what happened in Peru? Did Daisy used to be a bad fighter?” Kamala asks excitedly, bouncing up and down in her chair and earning a stern look from Jemma for disturbing the instruments.

“Oh gosh,” Jemma snorts, “she used to be awful! There was this one time training with –"

Jemma cuts herself off, and it doesn’t take a genius to work out why.

“The point is,” Daisy continues after a second of silence, “none of us were born kicking and punching. Gotta get trained some time, right?”

“Right,” Gwen says, rolling her eyes – Kamala looks a bit disappointed.

“Alright, that’s the tests done – everything seems fine, but I’ll send you both over a full medical report later when everything’s processed if you’d like?”

Both of the kids grimace. Daisy feels for them – she never understands half the stuff in those reports either.

“Okay, I’ll see you both at training later, yeah? We’re doing some powers-allowed sparring today, want to see how you both work them into things.” They both perk up at that, which doesn’t surprise her – neither had taken well to being told they needed to train in standard combat methods to start with.

They’d changed their tunes when she’d shown off sparring with Nebula – she’d had thorough combat training before she even got her powers, and even more afterwards, and the way she weaved the two together was a big part of why she was so good at what she did.

(It was also her way of passing on a bit of May’s legacy, as best she could. Even with things moving forward a little today, she wasn’t placing any bets on resurrecting half the universe.)

“Do you ever think we’re doing the wrong thing, bringing them into this?” Jemma asks after the kids have left. “I mean, after all we’ve been through…”

Daisy thinks about it a lot. But – 

“This stuff is just gonna come looking for them anyway, Jem. I mean, hell, Kamala was literally being hunted when we found her. Sure, right now we could look after them, hide them away and try to give them normal lives, but –"

“But this operation is no more guaranteed to last than any of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s iterations did.” Jemma finishes. Daisy nods.

“We’re not alive today because an organisation protected us – we’re alive because we found a family who loved us and trained us to be able to protect ourselves even after most of them are – are gone.”

Jemma sighs and leans back in her chair.

“I know. It’s just so strange, after everything, that this is our job now.”

“I know,” Daisy replies, “but what goes around comes around, right? 

\---

“I wasn’t able to find any direct information on these ‘Obelisks’ you described,” Carol is saying, “But after I – asked around – I was directed to this one. Apparently he was the lead scientist for the Casius family around the time of the initial inhuman experiments, and was forced to flee when they went wrong. He won’t say anything, though.” 

“Great,” Natasha says, letting out a breath. Daisy can tell she’s stressed – well, Natasha always seems stressed, but more stressed than usual. She can’t blame her. “It’s at times like this I really wish we still had a telepath on hand.”

“I’ve heard about a potential one over in the States,” Daisy says, making herself known, “Running some kind of school for powered people? It’s one on a long list of places we need to visit, but they’re not causing any problems so it’s pretty low –"

Daisy is interrupted by a high pitched shriek from the Kree man in chains.

“The Destroyer of Worlds! Get her away from me!”

The roof is silent briefly, before Natasha groans.

“Wait,” Carol says, “You’re the Destroyer of Worlds? You’re the reason the Confederacy won’t go anywhere near Earth anymore? The one who scared the shit out of Kasius so much he just decided to rejig his entire long term plan?”

“Um,” Daisy says.

“That’s her,” Natasha says. “I told you I had a lot on my hands.”

“When did you destroy a planet?!” Carol exclaims.

“Right, okay, so – I mean I didn’t do that in this timeline, and it’s still like, really unclear if it actually happened at all? But the title just kind of stuck, and I mean, I’m not complaining – “

“They say she is spoken of in prophecy,” the Kree man mutters, “that one day she shall be the end, that all will fall before her, that she shall leave no world unshattered!”

“That doesn’t sound like me,” she says.

“I’m pretty sure that’s all made up,” Carol says, “I talked to a guy who told me it was all getting spread around by Kasius to make the whole thing seem less embarrassing for him.”

“That sounds about right for a Kasius.”

“Alright, look,” Natasha says, stepping towards the Kree man with a level of menacing that she finds, uh – impressive. “Yes, this is the Destroyer of Worlds, and yes, she’s exactly as powerful as you think she is, prophecy or not. You have two options here. You can give us the information we want, and not only will we happily let you go free, but there’s a good chance that we can reverse the dustings too – “ his eyes widen at that, “Or you can keep your mouth shut over loyalty to a guy who clearly doesn’t give a shit about you and she can pummel your ass into the ground, and then pummel the ass of anyone who comes after you into the ground, up to and fucking including Kasius himself. Got it?” 

Yeah. Impressive. 

“I-I’ll talk,” the Kree man squeaks out.

\---

As it turns out, he doesn’t know _much_ – the Obelisk hadn’t actually been affiliated with the people in charge of the Inhuman project. Apparently it had been brought in by the Kree Empire itself, and their resulting fury at having to clear up the Kasius family’s mistakes was the reason they were now a part of the Confederacy instead.

Carol hadn’t heard anything about the things in her time with the Kree, as had already been ascertained, but they knew the Kree hadn’t told her much at all. Their best bet right now was looking to be backing the Skrull in their moves against the Kree, banking on taking down enough of their empire that they could maybe get their hands on – 

It was big picture stuff, basically, and nothing any of them besides Carol could really help with when they were this busy on Earth. They’d let Rocket and Nebula go off with her to provide support on that front, but now…

“How the fuck are we going to deal with this,” Natasha says as they watch the ship take off and fly away. She sounds so – tired.

“I don’t know,” Daisy says, feeling much the same way. “I really wish Coulson was here right now. Or May. They’d know what to do.”

Natasha laughs dryly as she sits down against the wall behind them.

“It’s strange. I’d say much the same thing – except with Fury and Maria in there too, maybe – and yet we never really knew them at the same time.”

Daisy sits down next to her.

“Yeah. Coulson talked about you a lot, for what it’s worth – it was always different when he was talking about you or Hawkeye. Less hero-worship, more… warmth.”

“I doubt Melinda talked about me,” Natasha says, a small smile gracing her face. She’s started growing her hair out properly – it’s long enough to go up in a bun now, all white and red mixed up and lovely.

“No,” Daisy says, laughing a little, “but she was a nightmare to get to talk about anything. The first I knew of Andrew was when he was psycho-analysing me.”

“That does sound like her,” Natasha says. “I wish, sometimes, that they had come back to us. Not right after Tahiti, perhaps, but at some point. I think, though,” she turns to look at Daisy, “that a great deal of good came from everything they did. I do not know if they still would have been able to do it – if together we could have solved all of our problems, or none of them.”

Daisy turns back to stare out at the skyline, trying her best to collect her thoughts.

“There’s a lot of things I wish I could change,” she starts. “I never really got the whole, framework treatment, and I wonder sometimes what they would have changed. What my biggest regret was, then or now. But, the whole point of that whole thing was that we can’t change those things – that even if we could, there’s no way of knowing whether it would be better or worse. If it would solve all of our problems, or none of them.” She turns back to look at Natasha.

“There’s no changing the past, but we can sure as hell change the future. I mean literally, I’ve done it, but you know what I mean – we can do our best to get them all back, and we can make things better here and now as much as possible, we can – we can save people. There’s no threat too big.”

She realises about a second too late that she’s saying that to a person who literally did go up against a threat too big, and lost, but –

“You’re right,” she says. “I think – the Avengers, who we were before, we weren’t really a team. We hated each other most of the time, we were just – we were all the Earth had. But this?” She waves around at the base. “Fuck knows we don’t have enough people to deal with any of what we’re up against. We’re overstretched, way past our breaking point, but – but I look around, here, and I get the same feeling I did back when it was just me, Clint, Phil and Melinda. We might have a tenth of the firepower, but I’d trust everyone here with my life, implicitly. With – with everyone’s lives.” 

Daisy grins and sidles up to nudge her.

“Look at you. Getting a bit soppy there, Director Romanov.” That earns her a real grin, and it’s kinda blinding.

“Oh, please. I’m starting to get it now, the difference between Fury and Phil. Fury’s S.H.I.E.L.D. was an organisation, but Phil’s was – his was a –“

“Family,” Daisy finishes for her, letting the warmth that word brings her these days bubble up in her chest, placing her hand over Natasha’s and turning back to the sky.

Natasha nods, looking back towards the horizon too. 

“Family.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> alRIGHT so. I'm gonna start trying to have this update on Wednesdays I think? maybe build up a bit of a buffer? this is the first time i've really had a multi-chapter fic that I didn't give up on after like. one chapter. but here we are at chapter 8 so i figure it's time i formalise things a lil bit
> 
> enjoy...some actual progress with nat and daisy's relationship for once


	9. Chapter 9

So, Kamala is kinda loving this whole, being on a superhero team, living in a cool secret base, (well, okay, it isn’t really that secret but it has the aesthetics of a secret base and that’s what counts) meeting all of her idols that aren’t currently small piles of dust or too traumatised to come anywhere near them… thing.

It’s great! Daisy is especially great, obviously, and Gwen is especially un-great, obviously, (who does she even think she is? The _real_ Spider-man was way cooler, and braver, and he’s one of those idols that’s currently a small pile of dust somewhere on an alien planet so she feels a certain level of obligation to rag on the new girl), but there’s also loads of people she had never even heard of before that are really _really_ great! 

There’s Elena, who’s inhuman too, and definitely doesn’t realise how crazy insane powerful her powers are – Kamala thinks she could probably just like super speed and take apart Iron Man’s suit and that would just be like, it, if they fought (Iron Man was never one of her idols for even a little bit – she could never quite get past the whole merchant of death thing).

There’s Jemma, who doesn’t have any powers, but she knows more about powers than anyone and they’ve been doing loads of cool tests on how big she can get and how strong that could theoretically make her and what the limits on her powers are – Jemma wants to make her a suit (Kamala nearly passed out when Jemma told her that) that would help her be able to control things a bit better and change shape along with her and all that. Also, she told her about this one time she went to an alien planet all by herself and survived by hunting the gross local fish and she thought that was really badass.

There’s Piper and Davis, who mostly seem to hang out with each other despite also seeming to mostly hate each other (she thinks they don’t actually hate each other), and Piper let her use the really big gun one time and she made her hand so big that it was like a pistol for her and Piper didn’t find that very funny but Davis wouldn’t stop laughing at her about it for a whole week, and she’d been worried that Piper wouldn’t like her after that but then she just got recruited into pranking Davis – she turned herself really small to turn off his special alarms that he got because Piper wouldn’t stop pranking him and Piper filled all the pockets of all his pants up with pudding – so now she thinks she’s even with both of them. Maybe.

And then there’s Fitz. Upon reflection, and re-reading her notes (yes, she was taking notes about her time on the base, having practical materials to look back on was vital to progressing in any skill, and also they’d be super useful reference if she ever got over how weird it felt to write superhero fic now that she was a superhero), she had realised that Fitz was the member of the team she had bonded with least. She saw him around when she was with Jemma sometimes, sure – they were really cute, and apparently they’d gotten married twice somehow, which was wild – and he came on missions, but that was like… it.

So! Today, her mission was to bond with Fitz. The team couldn’t be having a weak link in their bonds (apart from her and Gwen, that one was allowed), she’d seen movies, she knew that that would inevitably lend to a mission going awfully because they didn’t know each other well enough and then they’d still have to bond anyway in order to save all their friends or something, so really she might as well get it done now and out of the way.

She’d gotten Jemma talking about her plans for today when they were working on the suit yesterday, and she had mentioned that she wanted to take Fitz out to dinner but he had to be working on something in the lab all evening so they’d rearranged, so she knew Fitz was going to be in… a lab. There were a few, here? But she’d checked all but one, so she was like, 99% sure that Fitz was going to be –

“In… here!” she exclaims, pushing the door open to reveal Fitz sitting alone in a large lab room, bent over some electronics. He seems to take a few seconds to react, but eventually he turns up to look at her.

“Excuse me?” 

“Oh, sorry, I was just talking to myself. What are you working on?”

“Um,” Fitz is giving her a puzzled look, but he carries on anyway, “it’s just the, um – I’m just trying to get the bloody – I mean, uh, blooming? Is that? – anyway, I’m just trying to get this piece of hyper-violet scanning tech working, obviously it’s only really theoretically possible but if I could get it working practically we could do an in-depth scan of the storage room back at the lighthouse, maybe – “

Fitz stops, probably because she’s giving him an incredibly blank stare, and instead just sits there staring back at her. Oh god. This is – abort mission, primary objective failed, horrific awkwardness ensuing – 

“Do you, uh, want to hear a funny story about Daisy?” Backtrack, backtrack, mission possibly still on track, even if Fitz himself looks a bit horrified at his own words.

“Sure!” she squeaks out, pulling out a stool to sit down on and promptly having to make herself taller to get onto it. “I mean, um, only if you’re not too busy! I wouldn’t want to get in the way!” It’s not like she came here to deliberately interrupt his work to bond with him or anything.

"Oh no don’t worry about it it, it’s fine –" he says, sweeping his stuff to the side and cringing a little as a piece falls to the floor. "Um – well – okay, so, I hadn't actually thought of a story to tell – "

Kamala giggles. Okay, maybe _this_ is a viable path for bonding – they're both incredibly awkward and prone to babbling, that's gotta count for something.

"Okay, no, I've got something though – so, way back when, Daisy was in charge of this inhuman taskforce – they called themselves the Secret Avengers, I think? –"

"Wow, that’s a really cheesy name."

"I know, right? I totally would have told Daisy to change it, but I was a bit busy trying to rescue my wife from an alien planet – well, she wasn't my wife back then, but obviously I still wanted to rescue her, and I didn't even know she was getting it on with some spaceman guy –"

"Wait, what? Jemma got it on with a spaceman on an alien planet?" Fitz's eyes widened.

"Um, that's probably uh, classified information – well, not like, classified officially, but classified relationship information – anyway, the point is that Daisy had this whole team thing going on right? And obviously, Daisy being Daisy, she desperately wanted me to make them all fancy suits – "

"Like the one Jemma's making for me!"

"Yeah, exactly, except Daisy just wouldn't stop coming up with more and more ridiculous features she wanted, like, um," Fitz stops to consider for a second, "Oh, she wanted me to make it so that Joey – Joey was like, he could turn metal stuff into liquid, kinda? I don't know where he is these days actually – but she wanted me to make it so his suit would be able to just make new metal, on the spot, so he could use his powers even if we were in the middle of the desert of something."

"What, just from nothing?"

"Yeah! Obviously it was bloody – um, blooming ridiculous, but she kept asking! And, uh – oh, Elena was on the team at the time, and she wanted me to make her a suit that would slow down her heartbeat so she could go further in one yoyo! Which obviously would have been really dangerous, but it was also just stupid, because if she wanted to give Elena more power she could have just asked for like, lots of tiny manual detonation bombs? And then – "

"Elena could just like, zoom around and put little bombs all over something and like, boom! Oh my god, I keep trying to say this to Elena, there are so many really cool ways she could use her powers that would be like super ultra powerful – "

"Right?!" Fitz exclaims, getting noticeably more excited – mission success! 

“It’s – it’s really cool being here. Before, I – I kinda thought there was something wrong with me, but here it’s just like – everyone’s just like woah, that’s amazing, what other things can you do? Like, we try and work out what my limits are but it’s not like I’m being experimented on or anything, it’s just – fun. Like thinking about all the cool things your favourite superheroes could do."

Fitz smiles and reaches over to pat her shoulder.

“There’s – there’s nothing wrong with you. You’re just different now, is all.”

She hears a clatter from behind her and turns to see Daisy, gauntlets dropped on the floor in front of her, wearing a really weird expression.

“Oh – um – Daisy –“ Fitz gets out before Daisy interrupts him.

“Kamala, you should be in bed. Get going.”

“But it’s only – “ she tries.

“ _Kamala._ ” Daisy repeats, giving her a hard look, and she sighs and makes her way to the door.

“Night, Daisy. Night, Fitz!” she says as she leaves. 

“G’night, Kamala” Fitz says, and she catches a smile on his face as the door shuts behind her. Well. That…could have gone better, but she was definitely counting that as a success! Plus, she had added information for her notes now – there was something weird going on with Fitz and Daisy, and _that_ was why she hadn’t seen much of him till now. 

Which means, of course, she now has a _new_ mission. 

She grins to herself and skips back to her bunk, head already filling up with ideas.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welp, I'm swearing off ever trying to set a schedule for fic updates again - have a long-ish update to make up for the long-not-ish wait.


	10. Chapter 10

“Hi.” 

The word comes as a shock in the middle of a fast-paced set of katas – Natasha spins, ready to lash out if she has to, but it’s just Gwen, hanging upside down from a web behind her.

(She’s better at this, these days – once upon a time she would have ended up hurting someone anyway.)

“You know,” she says, looking around – the gym is as empty as it normally is at this time of night, spider-girls aside – “I never got to spend much time around Peter, but I hear he had a habit of appearing from the ceiling too – is that supposed to be a spider thing?”

Gwen shrugs, which looks a bit odd on an upside-down person.

“You usually find spiders on ceilings, right? Makes sense.”

Natasha sighs.

“What are you doing here, Gwen?” She’d been looking forward to some nightly exercise after a long, exhausting day – one of the absolute worst things about being in charge was having to deal with long talks from scientists, second only to having to deal with politicians.

Gwen stays silent as she lowers herself onto the floor, all grace and strength that Natasha knows she didn’t have to work for.

“I – “ she tries as she stands up properly. “I was wondering if you’d help me with some training.”

“Why?” Natasha asks after eyeing her for a second. “Daisy’s almost as good a fighter as me, and at your level the difference doesn’t matter.”

Gwen shifts, staring down at her feet – fairly unusual for the girl, given her standard brash confidence. How both of Daisy’s girls managed to be eerily similar to her in drastically different ways remained a mystery to her.

“It’s just – well, you used to do Ballet, right?” 

Natasha _freezes_.

There’s no reason Gwen should know that, no reason anyone around here should know that except _maybe_ Steve, so – what, Gwen had Hydra contacts? Hardly likely – no, more likely was that Gwen had some kind of contact with Clint, who did know that about her, but even that made no sense because Gwen had hardly left the base in weeks and she’d _know_ if Clint had been here – alternate universe bullshit? Had the girl known her, known someone who’d known her – 

“I – fuck, sorry if that’s not – it’s just, I can see it in your fighting, is all. Or at least I –“ Gwen continues, apparently much more privy to how much Natasha is freaking out than she’d like her to be, but…

“I can see it in your style, too,” she says, letting out a breath. It’s nothing bad. “It’s impressive, though, that you saw that. I make a point of making myself hard to learn anything about.”

“Yeah,” Gwen smirks, “I get that. But that’s – that’s why, it’s just – Daisy’s style is just different, you know? And I get that learning different styles is good and all, and it’s been really helpful, but –“

“But you’d like to keep pushing yourself in areas that come more naturally, too.”

“Well… yeah.” Gwen reaches a hand up behind her to scratch at the back of her neck.

Natasha looks Gwen over carefully. She can see the girl’s point – see what she has to offer her – but it doesn’t quite add up.

Gwen is, what, 16? She seems as determined as any hero, of course, but Natasha’s always gotten the impression that Gwen was here more because she has nowhere else to go than out of any burning desire to improve. She practically makes a show of the apathy most of the time, and Natasha knows looks can be deceiving, but they don’t often deceive _her_.

So, she doesn’t quite understand what’s going through Gwen’s head with this. The question is, is it worth pushing? She doesn’t think so – girl her age, with her temperament, more likely to get angry and block her out even further. Really, she should talk to Daisy about it, get her opinion, but in the mean-time – 

“Alright,” she says. “I’m making no promises about future sessions, but I don’t mind spending a couple hours with you tonight.”

Gwen grins – just a flash, just a second before she covers it up – and Natasha thinks she understands a little more of why Daisy took to this whole thing so quickly.

\---

“That tracks,” Daisy says as Natasha takes a seat in her quarters – there’s a small table in here with a few chairs around it, cards scattered on the surface from some game or other. “Gwen – she’s a lot like me, when I was her age. I didn’t give a shit about anything most of the time, but every now and then I’d just get these – I dunno, I don’t know how to explain it. Like, I was just so pissed off at the world, y’know? And sometimes that translated to apathy, but sometimes it translated into this burning desire to show just how amazing I could be, if I wanted to. Determination through spite, basically – ‘s how I got so good at coding.”

That, Natasha could understand. She’d more or less become a superhero out of spite at the world, after all.

“Why me, though?” she asks as Daisy takes a seat opposite her. “I mean, angry teenagers determined to make something of themselves tend more towards self-teaching and reckless mistakes, in my experience. Not carefully considering who might be most suited to helping them improve and then asking them politely.”

Daisy sighs.

“I mean – we’re into speculation here, but I think Gwen’s been through some pretty messed up shit. I mean, duh – that’s kinda a prerequisite for this whole business, right? But she seems – I look into her eyes sometimes and there’s a heaviness in there that I’m not sure even I have in me.”

A heaviness that Natasha does have, goes unspoken. That – it wasn’t a nice thought, but that made a lot more sense.

“Since when did you become the teenage-whisperer, anyway?” She says, trying to lighten the mood. Why is she trying to lighten the mood? She came here about work, not –

Fuck, who was she kidding?

“Since you dumped one on my lap?” Daisy replies, face breaking into an electric grin. “Honestly, I – I really appreciate you trusting me on that, actually. I know I wasn’t so into the idea initially, but I think – I think it’s been really good for me.”

“I agree,” Natasha says, a smile coming unbidden to her face that is far too soft for her liking. “You seem…happier, these days. Calmer.” God, what was she even – since when did she start paying enough attention to Daisy to notice that?

(Since the moment she stepped through the gates, a part of Natasha’s mind whispers.)

“I – uh – thanks,” Daisy says, cheeks red. “It’s what they would have wanted, I think? Doing for them what they did for me. Making sure the family keeps going, even if they don’t come back. I mean, still kinda think the whole concept of blood family’s a bit bullshit, but it’s enough to make a girl understand those weirdos who get all obsessed with their heirs, or their legacy or whatever.”

Natasha chuckles at that. 

“We certainly get enough of those types, don’t we? Show me a rich male supervillain who hasn’t gotten obsessed with the idea of their ‘progeny’ or something of the sort at some point.”

“I mean,” Daisy says, “It’s hardly exclusive to the villains. Like, from a certain point of view, Ultron – “

Natasha bursts out into laughter before she can finish. 

“Hey, come on, you know I’m right! And then Ultron with Vision, that whole thing was just like, overly self-important men obsessing over their legacy and accidentally having robot kids!”

Natasha wipes tears from her eyes. She doesn’t remember the last time she laughed this hard – or, well, she does actually, but she’s pretty sure that was Daisy too.

“No, no, you are completely right. Hank Pym comes to mind too, to be perfectly honest.”

Daisy snorts, and their eyes meet. It’s – warm. The kind of pleasant silence Natasha never really got the hang of. She wants to leave, wants to make an excuse and stalk off, but she also really just wants to – to take a second. Breathe it in.

Daisy feels similarly, if the way her muscles are visibly relaxing means anything at all.

“I should go,” she says eventually – you absolutely can have too much of a good thing, after all. “Even I need _some_ sleep. I’ll let you know if anything else happens with Gwen?”

“Yeah,” Daisy says, voice warm. “You’re welcome to do some training with her if you want – not that you need my permission of course, but – 

“I know what you mean,” Natasha says. “I think I might. It was nice, taking some time away from the bigger picture.”

Daisy smiles, and Natasha thinks she might just drown in that smile some day.

“Good night, Daisy,” she says instead, turning to leave.

“G’night, Nat,” Daisy replies, voice floating out through the door as it closes behind her, following her up, and up, and all the way down into her dreams.

\--X


End file.
